The Sitters

by Alex Miller

  I’m doing the door-sized oil. The vertical portrait. This is it. This is the portrait. It’s a picture of a woman sitting on a bed looking out of a window. It’s her. It’s her picture of herself. She rang me late at night, when it was lunchtime in London. She made the call from her bed in the hospital. We didn’t talk for long. I was in bed when the phone went. I stayed in bed imagining her at the other end in her bed. ‘What’s that noise?’ I asked her. ‘I’ll shut the door,’ she said. ‘Hang on a sec. It’s people in the corridor.’ Then her voice was quieter. As if we were in the same room. There’s still a girl in her. I listen to her voice and I’d like to tell her certain things. Even now I’d like to explain that absence thing. To explain it fully. Even though she’d laugh and tell me not to be silly. She’d say, T know already, you don’t have to explain anything to me.’ I can hear her saying this. But I’d still like to. It would sound as though I was being self-absorbed. Which I am being. There’s nothing to say.

  ‘So when are you getting out?’ I ask her. And she tells me she’ll be out soon but doesn’t have a date for it yet. But I don’t believe her. Then she says Caroline’s just arrived. Then we’ve hung up and we haven’t said anything. I’m sitting up in bed on my own staring at Henry sliding sideways out of his own portrait.

  I’m in the middle of the portrait when my son arrives without warning. This is the first time he’s ever come on his own. ‘Where’s Sandy?’ I ask him. ‘Where are the kids?’ But he doesn’t want to talk about it.

  ‘Have you got any beer, Dad?’

  I point him at the fridge. What’s going on? I put my hand on his arm and he stiffens and eases himself away from me. We used to have a cuddle. He gives me a sideways smile which I understand to mean he doesn’t intend to try explaining anything to me because he thinks I wouldn’t understand. I’m edgy. I need to get back to her portrait. It’s waiting for me. He comes into the studio and looks at what I’m doing and we drink beer.

  ‘What are you working on, Dad? Who’s she? Do I know her?’

  I realise I’m waiting for him to leave. There’s nothing I can do for him. He’s thirty-four. But he stays.

  ‘I’ll be right,’ he says. ‘You don’t need to worry about me. Just get on with your work as if I’m not here.’

  He’s kidding, of course. He wanders out to the kitchen. But I can still see him from the studio. He’s standing at the sink looking out the window. I can’t work. He’s being careful. He’s keeping quiet so he won’t disturb me. But it’s not his noise that’s disturbing me. I’d rather he started yelling and screaming and carrying on and told me what’s bothering him than this creeping around. If it’s none of my business, why has he come here? It’s his home. It’s where he grew up. He’s left something here that bothers him. He doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t know how to locate it.

  He stays for a week. He hasn’t brought anything with him. He doesn’t go out. I go out. I bring the shopping back and I cook meals for both of us. He stands in doorways looking into rooms. I don’t ask him to leave. I lie awake far into the night, thinking of her and listening to him. A door going. The flywire door creaking. What’s he doing? He’s sitting out the back with a beer. We don’t talk.

  I did some big charcoal drawings of her from life. These drawings are on heavy paper, they’re four metres high by two metres wide. I used two step ladders. I did seven. They involved extreme foreshortening and narrow closeups. Three of them worked okay and I kept them. I destroyed the others. So I had this tryptich, like Japanese banners on the wall, as if I lived in a castle. Some people spend an entire year doing a town in central Victoria, or in Spain or France. I spend a year doing a woman or a man, or a family, a group. What’s the difference? Is there more to a town than there is to a person? Flaubert said, If I go so slowly, it’s because a bookjbr me is a special way of living. Well that’s a portrait for me. A way of living. My life, not someone else’s. There’s a whole show in it. Maybe two.

  My son was standing up close to these big drawings staring at them. They are nude studies. Glimpses. Diagonals. Verticals. You don’t see much. Mark, that’s my son, is standing up close to these drawings of Jessica and he’s staring at them for a long time. ‘What do you think of them?’ I asked him.

  ‘How can you find these people interesting.’

  There was a certain amount of contempt in the way he said this, as if he wished to imply that my entire life was some kind of a sham. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘You know, they pay me. The money’s very good.’ I did that to confirm him. To let him think he was right about me.

  ‘You never painted us. You never found us that interesting. Me and Mum.’

  It’s true of course and it hurts to hear him say it. He’s talking about my weakness. But you reach a point where you cease trying to justify yourself. The first thing some people do then is to judge you harshly. And it turns out that’s just what they’ve been waiting for an opportunity to do. For years. If you won’t defend yourself then you must be a bastard and there’s an end of it. He left in the morning. He’d made his point. It worried me of course. But there’s only so much energy left. Either you use your energy for your work or you use it for something else.

  His contempt for Jessica, for my project, for me, increased my energy for her. His contempt gave me more energy for my work. But it also got me gnawing away at the family connection while I was working with her material. There was this confusion of subject matter leaching into my work. It puzzled me. It excited me. I didn’t know what I was really up to. I felt I was on the edge of finding something. I didn’t dare to examine it.

  I remember the hour he was born. I remember his first breath. The way his little blue body turned pink and he started to live for himself. I’ve forgotten a lot of other things, but I still remember that. ‘Breathe!’ I implored him. It was the moment I became vulnerable.

  She sits on her old bed with her chin in her hand gazing out at her mother at work in the garden, and she wonders why she’s come back. Her departure from the valley as a girl of eighteen was not blessed, but entailed the complexities and uncertainties of a renunciation, the ambivalence and the betrayals of abandoning her rights and titles, and her responsibilities; all those things for which she was held to be accountable by her mother and her grandmother; her place, in other words, the Keal place, the garden that her great-grandmother, Amelia Keal, had established in 1854, the year her husband came upon the first grains of gold ever to be seen by a European in the Araluen creek.

  But the garden of the Keal women outlasted the men and the dredges and the gold. It outlasted the noise and the industry and the excitement and the tragedies and the disappointments and the heroes and the myths. Eccentric, determined and persistent, it outlasted them all. Lost to history. Jessica was a Keal woman. The fourth. She had gathered her courage and her dreams and had reversed Amelia’s founding act. She had determined it must all come to an end, the eccentric persistence to no avail.

  She brought with her these family likenesses and certain forgotten episodes of my childhood. Which is not something I’m prepared to try to explain. You could easily have three volumes of memoirs on that subject alone. All I know is nowadays I’m painting a portrait of my sister. That’s what I’m up to. And there’s plenty more to do. I’m even playing around with my father’s portrait. I’ve done a few sketches. At the moment he looks like one of Diirer’s old men. Jessica’s mother. But maybe I’ll improve on that. He’s in the mirror whenever I want to have a look. I see him looking back at me. He’s forgiven me, I think. I’ve got energy. I’m painting the absence and the silence of my childhood. These days I’m doing family portraits. There’s not much information. No beautifully structured lives. Scraps and hints and glimpses and bits of old snapshots and a few memories. That’s it. I can’t ask them to sit for me. That’s all there ever is. Fragments.

  Some time after Jessica’s mother died Caroline wrote to me about disposing of the place and I went down to have a last look. The agent was w
ith a young couple in the kitchen. No smoking redgum log, however. The place was cold and filled with the smell of her mother’s earth. They were tourists from Canberra looking for a hobby farm. So I bought the place before they could say a word. I paid twice what it was worth to them. I thought that was it. I intended to just let the old place rot away and fall into a heap. But I couldn’t leave it alone. So here I am. I’ve been here ever since. I moved in. I shan’t be moving out again. Michael approves. He thinks it’s good for a successful artist to live in a place like this. ‘An authentic Australian setting,’ he calls it. ‘This place has got distinction,’ he says. He enjoys coming here. It makes a change from Sydney. He likes the broken post-and-rail fence. He’s got plans. A larger studio, a bunkhouse for the guests. And so on. He likes bringing the buyers here. The admirers. The aficionados. He shows them around and takes them down to her bathing hole for a swim. This gives him a chance to strip off and flash himself. He’s delighted about being a repulsive old man. I told him something about the walnut tree. We were sitting up there on the hill watching the evening and drinking some wine and not saying much.

  ‘In a hard time,’ I told him, ‘this tree releases a poison from its roots. The poison kills its offspring and ensures its own survival.’ Which was something she told me. He liked that. It appealed to him. Michael’s the only one left who’s known me all these years. We don’t have to say anything. Even more than making money, which is really his mask, Michael cares for painters and painting. More than anyone else I’ve known. He doesn’t want to own anything. Caring for painters is really his vocation. In the early days I didn’t understand him. But maybe he didn’t understand himself then either. He never met her. He regrets that.

  ‘How come I never met her?’ he asks whenever a reference to her comes up in the conversation. He suspects me of having intentionally kept her out of his way.

  She woke herself with a great shuddering snore, lying on her back on the iron bed as if she’d been felled by a blow, her mouth agape, her throat dry and roasting, one naked leg unslung loosely over the side of the bed. She couldn’t move. She was crippled in mind and body. She lay there puzzling as to where she could be. The light had mellowed. The day had weakened and was sliding away towards the hills. Light was no longer roaring outside and bouncing back from the window but was seeping into the room at a low, sneaky angle. Sidling in and washing about the little room. Searching for something. Seductive fingers of light seeking out the form of the woman on the bed, modelling her. A soft golden glow accumulating about the flesh of her naked thigh, flattering and caressing.

  Now that the day is withdrawing the room has ceased to resist and is warm, and she has become all softly crumpled shadows and a sense of disarray. Her face is turned away from the viewer. She might be the victim of a brutal murder. A crime of passion. A momentary rage. A bedroom portrait. One of Sickert’s sinisterly anecdotal fables, The Sunday Visitor. A violent death. You can still smell her visitor in the stuffy air, and smell their passion.

  The story is my secret.

  Jessica lay still after the passing of the snore, her mind dragging upward through her dreams, carrying to a distant surface she might never reach. That she might wish never to reach. A low, intermittent murmuring floating in the air. With an enormous effort she sat up. She groaned and pressed her hand to her chest. There was a hard lump of pain deep within her sternum. The disembodied murmur resolving into the sound of a motor vehicle. She breathes and massages the pain, remembering.

  I destroyed several of these but three versions have survived. This last one, the one in which she’s sitting up with her hand pressed to her chest and the room is almost in darkness, is once again a narrow, vertical painting, tightly enclosing the scene. Her pale arm and her pale thigh. Viewed at a diagonal through an exceedingly tall doorway. A big painting. One of my biggest. But just a glimpse of something, a concentration on this little moment that is driven inward by the tight framing of the doorway. It measures four metres high by one and half metres wide.

  There’s only one road through the Araluen Valley. The surface of this road is gravel. It scrambles past the Keal place a hundred metres or so up the hill, cutting an uneven path through the stringybark forest just beyond the walnut tree, which is not on Keal land but is on Forestry Commission land. Jessica sits on her bed massaging her chest and listening to the sound of the vehicle as it comes and goes, hollowing a space into the silence of the afternoon, then withdrawing out of earshot into a timbered gully, before returning again, louder than before, the illusion that it is getting closer, as if the driver has changed his mind and is coming back.

  ALSO FROM ALLEN & UNWIN

  JOURNEY TO THE STONE COUNTRY

  Alex Miller

  WINNER OF THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD

  ‘The most impressive and satisfying novel of recent years. It gave me all the kinds of pleasure a reader can hope for.’ —Tim Winton

  A terrific tale of love and redemption that captivates from the first line.’—Nicholas Shakespeare, author of The Dancer Upstairs

  ‘Miller’s fiction has a mystifying power that is always far more than the sum of its parts . . . his footsteps—softly deftly steadily—take you places you may not have been, and their sound resonates for a long time.’ —Andrea Stretton, Sydney Morning Herald

  Betrayed by her husband, Annabelle Beck retreats from Melbourne to her old family home in tropical North Queensland where she meets Bo Rennie, one of the Jangga tribe. Intrigued by Bo’s claim that he holds the key to her future, Annabelle sets out with him on a path of recovery that leads back to her childhood and into the Jangga’s ancient heartland, where their grandparents’ lives begin to yield secrets that will challenge the possibility of their happiness together.

  With the consummate artistry of a novelist working at the height of his powers, Miller convinces us that the stone country is not only a remote and exotic location in North Queensland, but is also an unvisited place within each of us. Journey to the Stone Country confirms Miller’s reputation as one of Australia’s most intelligent and uncompromising writers.

  ISBN 1 74114 146 X

  CONDITIONS OF FAITH

  Alex Miller

  WINNER OF THE NSW PREMIER’S PRIZE FOR FICTION

  ‘This is an amazing book. The reader can’t help but offer up a prayerful thank you: Thank you, God, that human beings still have the audacity to write like this.’ —Washington Post

  ‘I think we shall see few finer or richer novels this year . . . a singular achievement.’ —Andrew Riemer, Australian Book Review

  A truly significant addition to our literature.’ —The Australian

  When Alex Miller’s mother died she left him her fragmentary journal from the 1920s. Inspired by her exotic tales as a young woman living in Paris and this entree into her emotional life, Miller has written Conditions of Faith.

  With university behind her, Emily Stanton finds herself on the threshold of life. Introduced to a Scottish engineer, the exoticism of his life in Paris beckons, and she leaves her family home in twenties Melbourne to become his wife. But far from providing answers, her conventional marriage awakens in her an ardent desire to find a reason for living beyond that of simply wife and mother, a desire that leads her to flirt with risk, passion and unorthodox friendships, and carries her to Tunisia on a journey of self-questioning and intellectual reawakening. Conditions of Faith is a provocative romance, but it is also an elegant and intellectually abundant meditation on a timeless dilemma. Impetuous yet entirely sympathetic, Emily Stanton, like Henry James’ Isabel Archer, is in search of a reason for living in a society where motherhood is deemed reason enough. This mesmerising and thought-provoking story of dreams, obsessions and destiny will hold you in thrall.

  ISBN 1 86508 485 9

  THE ANCESTOR GAME

  Alex Miller

  WINNER OF THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD

  A wonderful novel of stunning intricacy and great beauty.’ —Michael Ondaa
tje

  The Ancestor Game, which Robert Dessaix described as ‘one of the most engrossing books I’ve read in a long time’, is an enthralling journey into the ancestral dreams and present dilemmas of a rich cast of characters.

  Steven Muir, August Spiess and his daughter Gertrude, and Lang Tzu all acknowledge a restless sense of cultural displacement, an ambivalence in their relations with the culture of European Australia. Steven left England for Australia as a young man and his one attempt at returning is unsuccessful. August Spiess, although he speaks frequently of returning to his native Hamburg, fails to make the journey as does his daughter Gertrude. Lang Tzu’s very name defines his fate: ‘two characters which in Mandarin signify the son who goes away.’

  The ‘game’, however, does have winners. For despite their yearnings for the home of their ancestral dreams, a desire to belong somewhere that is truly their own, none of Miller’s characters leaves Australia, and each in their own way comes to see that to be at home in exile may be a defining paradox of the European Australian condition: the paradox of belonging and estrangement that perhaps lies uneasily at the heart of all European cultures.